


From Herr To Eternity

by TheAstronomyMod



Category: Blixa Bargeld (Musician), Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Genre: Angelus Novus, I just threw in every single damned Berlin cliche I've encountered since I arrived in this city, M/M, The Angel of History, The Author Regrets Everything, Walter Benjamin, West Berlin, actually angelic, and drug abuse, deals with themes of addiction, gay angel sex, may the lord have mercy on my soul, or caryatids - I had to thrown some caryatids in there, so don't read if drug use is going to bother you, wibbly wobbly timey wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-09-29 08:10:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17199797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomyMod/pseuds/TheAstronomyMod
Summary: Berlin, on the cusp of the 90s, the Wall has only just fallen and no one knows what will come next.The narrator (English-speaking, the singer in a band, that's as much as you're getting - it's up to your own imaginations to decide for yourselves who he might be) takes a wrong turn in Kreuzberg, and slips through time, to encounter Walter Benjamin's Angel of History - who may or may not be Blixa Bargeld.





	1. Ballhaus

I still don’t quite know how I ever found the Ballhaus in the first place. The evening started badly, with a wrong turn out of Kotti, which was still a very dangerous place in those days, far more piss-drenched and dodgy that it still is, even today. There was a spot of bother with a couple of aggressive beggars who had clearly marked me as a soft touch upon hearing my poor German, but as I am neither a well-built man, nor a particularly bellicose one, I took the gentleman’s way out, and did my best to run away. Dodging their malevolent entreaties and vaguely threatening requests, I ducked the wrong way across the intersection, and trotted off, as fast as my long legs would allow, one eye still cast over my shoulder to watch them follow me for a bit before giving up, casting curses and broken bottles at my retreating back. I’d crossed the canal before I’d even realised my mistake, but I didn’t want to aggravate the situation by having to retrace my steps and face them again, especially now they’d had time to gather reinforcements, so I slipped off Kottbussesr’s main drag of kebab houses and glitzy Turkish bakeries, hoping to double back, and cross the canal back into Kreuzberg further downstream.

I know it well enough now, that maze-like warren of tall, ornate, art nouveau tenements punctuated with the dark abysses of bombsites, where Neukölln makes a strange, triangular, knife-cut of an incursion into neighbouring Kreuzberg, but in those days, it was a dank, unfamiliar, even forbidding tangle of streets. It had been dark for some hours already – in midwinter, Berlin could be dark by half past three – but the gloom of those streets felt almost tangible. Through the biting cold, I trudged, the air so freezing that it was as if the city’s own exhaled breath had turned to flurries of snowflakes, glittering in the air before stinging against my cheeks. Writhing sinuous plasterwork danced abruptly out of the gloom, a pale face suddenly rearing up and looming, as if hanging in the sky above, like a ghoul-white, staring, suicided wretch. Twice, maybe three times, I startled, stepped back and tried to mutter ‘Entschuldigung’ before realising I was addressing the plaster ghost of some long-dead Kaiserzeit maiden, preserved in ornamentation beside a doorway, or above a window.

To make matters worse, the snow was thickening, from those pretty, sparkling flakes that seemed to crystallise out of thin air, to thick, claggy clumps that would soon soak through the shoulders of the inappropriate jacket I had picked up on record company credit in London that autumn. Even compared to London, Berlin’s sharp cold, its cutting, arctic winds juddering off the Spree, and its fierce snow squalls had taken me by surprise, but it was only partly vanity that kept me in my thin but stylish London clothes – mostly, I just couldn’t afford one of those long, bear-like coats that Berliners favoured. Giving up on finding the canal again, I decided to navigate my way back to Kottbusserdamm, hoping the aggressive beggars had found another mark. I turned right, and then right again, scanning for any sign of life, the bright lights of the avenue, or even just the yellow glow of a Lokale or a Spätkauf where I might wait out the worst of the snow, but only murky blocks of flats loomed ahead of me, cold and dark, with not so much as a neon beer advert showing this late after midnight.

I was about to give up hope, and scrap my pride, and turn around, to retrace the way back to Kotti by the exact path I had come, beggars and all, when abruptly a cone of golden lamplight spilled out across the street. A snatch of fast-paced conversation, as if from a bar or a party, a curl of wild gypsy violin, and then a couple came tumbling, laughing, out of the door in a whirl of heavy winter coats and an eddy of feathers that might have been a boa. I quickened my pace to catch the door before it fell closed again, but one of them kindly held it for me.

‘You’re a bit young for this crowd,’ said the stranger, and I laughed apologetically, for I had always had a boyish face. Then it struck me as odd that I’d understood them, for it took a moment to register that it had not been English. Perhaps my German was improving! A moment after that – a bit of a long moment, I’m afraid, as I admit I was slightly high, as I was always high in those days – I caught the meaning, and wondered if I were stumbling into some private party. I turned to ask if the gathering were invitation only, but the strangers were gone, leaving only the snow, already deepening on the pavement outside, and the ever-present sulphuric whiff of badly burned brown coal. I turned back to the door, lingering for a moment, until I was relieved to read some ponderous German name listed as proprietor, followed by small print, heavy black-letter type advertising Spirits, Liqueurs and Other Fine Liquids, in German, a language that looked like Russian, and English. It was a bar.

A voice called out from inside over the dull wail of the gypsy violin, sharp, female, of indeterminate age, but this one definitely speaking German. >>So, are you coming in, or...?<< The intimacy of the informal ‘du’ softened that brassy, slightly aggressive Berliner ‘ _oder..._?’ from a vague threat to an invitation. I made up my mind and pushed my way inside.

A cloth over my face. Heavy velvet and the damp feeling of suffocation. But a brief wrestle with a phantom that turned out to be only a curtain hung inside the door to keep out the cold and damp, and I was inside, blinking at the dusky half-light which seemed to be somehow darker than the pitch-dark night outside. Though it was lit by a thousand pin-points of light, candles mostly - reflected off glints of old-fashioned gilt mirrors and bits of shiny bric-a-brac and what seemed to be dozens of glittering eyes - the tiny flickering flames seemed only to intensify the dark, cave-like gloom of the bar. The smell was intense, cigarette smoke and the beeswax of the candles mixing with the raisin-sweet scent of spilled wine, some musky perfume barely covering the unwashed bodies smell of hundreds of years of human occupation, but though the bar was obviously full, it did not feel crowded.

>>What are you drinking then, darling?<< My attention was dragged back to the tiny woman I hadn’t noticed move to my side. She was small, very thin and neat, with dark hair piled on her head in a style that looked like it had washed up from some far-gone era, though her thick make-up and exaggerated eyes were of the style current with middle-aged women all over Berlin. Did I say middle-aged? It was hard to tell. Her face had that glazed, well made-up, ageless look that meant she could be anywhere from 35 to about 70, but from the sound of her voice, it was obviously she who had beckoned me inside. She coughed and tapped painted nails against her waitressing tray, clearly growing impatient with my indecision, but as I looked around, I could not spy any kind of menu or drinks offering, let alone prices – such a detail being important at that impoverished time in my life.

>>I would have, gladly, the house... the house...<< my limited German expired as I wondered if such an establishment would serve wine or beer.

>>The house specialty<< she supplied with a curt nod and strode off.

I looked about me for a place to sit, as every table near the door seemed taken. The other patrons sat in couples or small groups, dressed in dark, heavy, seemingly very formal clothes, and I felt suddenly quite underdressed. The stylish London clothes I favoured typically drew sarcastic comments in Berlin clubs, but apart from the occasional curious glance as I moved past, no one paid me the slightest attention. To be anonymous in such a place felt like a relief after too many eyes in too many audiences, so I pushed through from the small front room to the next, though it was hard to really get a grip on how large the place was.

These old Berlin buildings, some of them could stretch back for a quarter of a mile from the streetfront, though courts and hofs and side-wings and garden houses. As I entered the back room, I had the sense of great space, the ceiling above writhing with ornate plasterwork and painted cherubs, though the walls were covered with dark, velvety drapes parting only to reveal flecks of gilded wallpaper, all of it tattered and faded, shot through with the occasional suspicious hole that looked like a bullethole or a burn mark. Candles had melted down and been relit over the remains of gutted candles, it seemed for decades, as huge drifts of melted wax formed surreal landscapes beneath decorated holders. And here was the source of the music: a small group of musicians, violin and accordion, clarinet and drum, were gathered by the smouldering fireplace, playing a melancholy, and yet thrillingly wild tune that seemed as old and yet as familiar as Berlin itself. The large room was completely full, even to the tables lining the far wall, so although I was tempted to stay and listen to this pulsating gypsy drone, I found a door and pushed on into the next room.

This inner cavern was like a ballroom, with dusky, tarnished mirrors reflecting each other back and forth to eternity in the glittering candle-night. High up in the gloom, not so much a raised ceiling as a dome of velvet night, hung what looked like a cut-crystal chandelier, unlit but still glinting, as faint as distant stars. A ring of booths surrounded a wide circular area that must once have been a dance floor, though it was now covered with more of those low tables, and every stool was crowded round with the magpie-clothed clientele, plucking at their glittering drinks and laughing softly. I was about to give up and go back to the front room, to see if there were a bar I could perch up against, when I noticed the entrance to a staircase at the back of the chamber, and caught the glimpse of a balcony above. Curiosity seemed to drag me on, deeper into the interior of the club, stumbling carelessly up the stairs, their now-threadbare, but once clearly very luxurious Persian carpet held in place with well-polished brass rods. My hand touched the rope that served as a handrail – silk – and brushed against the wallpaper – flocked velvet, soft and thick and slightly damp, like the living moss of a forest. I recoiled – it wasn’t unpleasant, but it felt slightly obscene, like the touch of something one should not ever feel – and carried on climbing.

At the top of the stairs was another set of heavy velvet curtains in some indistinct wine-dark colour, which I managed to part and slip through without incident this time. I had thought my entrance soundless, but as I appeared, framed by the velvet, every head turned towards me for a single heartbeat, these oddly ageless, beautiful Berliners, their faces rendered as pale and stone-like as the plaster goddesses outside by the dim, flickering light. Beautiful women, elegant men, faces haughty and proud, but not even remotely curious once they realised I was not who they awaited, and turned back to their own business again, with only the merest indication of a sigh as low chatter resumed.  But this balcony, at least, was a less crowded, more intimate parlour of a space, the low tables and plain stools replaced by ornate but well-worn furniture from another century, dilapidated brocade worn through in places, mismatched armchairs and overstuffed leather sofas, albeit with a few brass buttons missing. And here, at last, was a free table, so I gratefully made my way over, looking forward to sinking into one of those comfortable wing chairs.

But as I reached the table: disaster! From the door, I had not noticed the small gold-embossed sign declaring ‘reserviert’.

I looked about, a little desperate, wondering if the couple opposite would allow me to perhaps perch on the back of their chesterfield, when the waitress reappeared, bearing a small glass of some unidentifiable liquid on her tray.

>>Will you sit, _or_...?<< she chided. I gestured to the sign, but she merely shrugged and whisked it off the table onto her tray before lifting down the drink and placing it by the nearer of the wing chairs.

>>Many thanks<< I said limply, wondering if I should raise the issue of payment, or wait until pressed. To establish a tab in such a place , who knew what kind of a debt that might incur. I had learned the hard way, that when items in Berlin markets or bars were not visibly priced, the price you paid depended very much on who you _were_.

But as she turned, as if to walk away, the elegant waitress’s impassive face cracked a wicked smile. >>After all, _she_ won’t mind the company. And you might be the sort of thing she’s been waiting for.<<

A shiver went down my spine, even as my ears pricked up with interest. _She_? Well, a lady might make this surreal evening more interesting. But female companionship, like everything else in this blasted city, always came with its own price. I hoped only that she was beautiful, or failing that, at least young.

I sighed and settled myself to my fate, then frowned down at my drink as I examined it. This was not at all what I had expecting, but I picked it up and sniffed at the dark, rusty-amber liqueur. Port? Sherry? God, I hated those old-maid drinks, and the memories they inspired of dutiful Boxing Day dinners with maiden aunts. But the smell was all wrong, sickly sweet with the slightly medicinal whiff of herbs, exacerbating sinuses numbed by too many cigarettes and the passage of other, less legal stimulants. Lifting it to my mouth, I allowed a drop onto my tongue, to find it not entirely unpleasant. The reassuring burn of a high alcohol content masked the taste of both sugar and herbs, but still, I was pierced with a sudden sharp craving to be _higher_.

Well, no chance of that in a place like this, I thought to myself, so I did my best to redirect the urge towards a craving for a cigarette, patting down my pockets until I located the last, crumpled cigarette packet, shaking its contents desperately into my hand, relieved to see that there was at least one fag still left in there. Trying to prolong the operation, I tapped it several times on my knee before unending it, packing the tobacco for a more satisfying smoke as I searched my pockets for a lighter. No luck. I was forever losing the things, to friends or girls or even passing strangers, always too careless with my own possessions.

Still, there was the candle on the table, locked up as it was inside some beautiful cut-glass contraption designed to diffuse and filter the flickering light. Prying open the lid by flipping a little catch, I popped the cigarette into my mouth and bent forwards, flicking my fringe out of my eyes as I held the tip of my cigarette to the tiny flame, inhaling deeply and waiting for the nicotine to hit my lungs.

Sparks. An explosion of light. A roar of wind like a thousand wings beating at once. Voices, chatter, then a sudden stillness of almost total silence, like the heavy velvet curtain at the entrance to the room had opened for a moment, then dropped completely closed, smothering all sound. The room seemed to shake, as rough hands gripped me and pulled me back, away from the flame that had suddenly leapt up by several inches to an alarmingly dangerous height.

‘It’s gas, I wouldn’t fuck about with that.’ An ivory-pale hand flicked in front of me, snapped the valve back and the lid flat, as the flame retracted again inside its crystal cage. ‘Allow me?’ The voice was deep, rich, rolling, and again, that same sense as with the couple outside, that I could understand it, even though the voice _wasn’t speaking English_.

The slender, elegant ivory-pale wrist reappeared, this time clutching a battered Zippo lighter, igniting a slightly more tame flame of only two or three inches high. I leaned forward gratefully, and this time lit my fag without danger.

“Thanks,” I muttered as I inhaled deeply and felt the nicotine soothing nerves rattled by my near-accident.

“English?” said the voice, this time definitely in my own language.

“Something like that,” I replied cautiously. I had learned long ago not to correct people too carefully as to my nationality, as the observation was usually intended only about language and not birthplace.

Again, that rushing sound, but this time it was not gas, but a body pushing past, and collapsing heavily into the wing chair opposite me in a blur of silk and leather and thick black wool. I blinked, and then I stared, for the person sitting opposite me was like no one I had ever seen before in my life.

Tall, very thin – not gaunt or emaciated, but simply elegantly wasted, as graceful as an Italian greyhound – and perfectly androgynous. Not sexless, you understand, like the pretty angels one finds on sentimental Victorian tombs, but somehow both masculine and feminine, mixed together in an unearthly beauty, sharp, piercing, seductive beauty, like a rococo statue of Satan – not a devil, horned and ugly and boiled red – but Lucifer himself, the bringer of light, the most beautiful angel ever to have lived, too beautiful to bow before any mere man. Pale ivory skin, the colour of a newly printed book. Light brown hair, long, straight, shoulder length, though the flickering gaslight seemed to lend it shimmering reddish highlights. Above sharply pointed Gothic Cathedral cheekbones were a pair of deep, intelligent, crystal-blue eyes, glittering with curiosity and a sort of helpless arrogance, not a cruel arrogance, not malevolent or mean-spirited, but more the kind of amused haughtiness of someone who has lived for several thousand years, and already knows every word you will ever say, before you even open your mouth to speak.

 _She_. This creature sat opposite me, and I stared, wordless, trying to work out if I had misunderstood the waitress’s German pronouns, or if this was an interloper as unexpected as myself. The creature opposite me shrugged off their long black winter coat, revealing an artfully ruffled black silk shirt, tied at the neck with a great, extravagant looping bow in the fashion of another century, and a pair of form-fitting black leather trousers as up to the minute as a fast German sportscar. He seemed at once, in his finery, to be as natural a part of the room as if he had grown there, and yet at the same time, a complete anachronism, wandered in from another, less formal decade. But I kept my own coat on, for although the room was warm, my stylish London clothes definitely did not fit in, and I felt as if I were the one who were hopelessly outdated.

As I gazed, the man – for the deep voice suggested it was a man, though the intense beauty seemed distinctly feminine, with kohl-darkened eyes and lips so red and full they had to be painted – looked about the room, until his eyes lighted on something or someone. Abruptly, raising his hand above his head, he made a sharp gesture, not clicking his fingers so much as beckoning with an urgency I would find it hard to refuse.

The waitress reappeared within moments, bearing a bottle of wine, with a thick layer of dust half-obscuring a very old-fashioned label. Quickly and efficiently, she deposited it, and a small glass in front of the new arrival, chatting away at him in that very slangy and affectionate Berliner dialect that left me completely lost, but in no doubt that this was the expected regular.

>>Please, please – fetch another glass. You can’t expect him to drink _that_ all night...<< He gestured towards my liqueur, rolling his Rs dramatically, but before the woman could clear it away, I made sure to down the rest in one gulp, too fast to taste the medicinal tang. No need to waste strong alcohol, even if my head was now reeling. >>And a pack of cigarettes? You know my brand, Schatzi, have you got any behind the bar? Be a darling, I’m dying for a smoke<< and so on, in the camp, over-familiar, playful, half-flirting tone of an out-of-work actor. The formidable waitress giggled and tittered and went off to fetch the cigarettes.

Then finally, his business complete, he turned his sharp blue eyes back to me. “So,” he intoned, taking a sip of wine that stained his glossy lips an almost ruby-red. “Amuse me. Tell me, Englisher, what you have come to Berlin for.”


	2. History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The narrator finds himself charmed by mysterious companion, as he slips into conversation, and intoxication.

The request took me by surprise, though really it shouldn’t have, as it was the obvious question given my accent. But what surprised me even more, was that I did not want to tell this elegant creature the plain and simple truth, that I had come to Berlin to play a few gigs with my band. On one level, I think I was just tired of being a musician, tired of living as this performer always in the public eye. But on some other, deeper or more shallow level, I found myself wanting to impress this man, and I knew that he would not be impressed by the singer in a mere rock band.

“I came to Berlin,” I heard my voice saying, “Because I have an interest in history.”

“History?” The most extraordinary look came over the creature’s face, starting with surprise, sliding through a veiled, narrow-eyed curiosity, then ending in a slightly mocking look of amused disdain as his lips curled into a smile. “What do you know of Berlin History, Englisher? You all want to gawk at the remnants of the Wall, don’t you? To flirt with the last vestiges of Fascism, and carouse with the Communists, like the victor always loves to dirty himself by daubing on the blood of the vanquished. You want history? I can show you where the bullet-holes are.” Although his English was perfect, his heavy accent seemed to highlight the strange erudition of his word choices, and I found myself once again ashamed of my poor German.

“No,” I protested gently, taking a drag of my cigarette and wishing I still had a drink. “That’s not really my era at all. I prefer something a bit earlier.”

“Earlier?” suggested my companion, picking up his glass and wetting his lips. “The bloodthirsty Prussians, the Kaiserzeit and all that warmongering nonsense?”

I shook my head briskly, sucking down one more gasp of nicotine before I had to stub out the pathetic end of my cigarette. It would allay the cravings, but only for a while. “No. The Weimar Era is more my thing. The interwar period. Hyperinflation and sexual freedom. Elegance, and decadence. You know, looking around a place like this...” I gestured about me, wishing I still had my cigarette to punctuate the conversation. “One feels one could almost... peel back the layers of time like so much faded wallpaper, and see through, dimly, darkly, like shadows from an oil lamp, the girls who danced here, the men who drank, the card sharks and gangsters and entrepreneurs and lovers, just out of reach in the smoky haze...”

The beautiful creature laughed, snatching me out of my reverie as he threw back his head and let out a great animal snort of pure unfettered amusement. “You would really want, to see into the past, _here_ , in this place?” he started to ask, leaning forward, his eyes flashing with a bright blue fire of pure, concentrated interest, but just at that moment, the waitress reappeared.

>>For your guest<< she announced, slightly sarcastically, laying a second cut crystal glass in front of me, adding a slightly suspicious warning glance, as if to say, _you break it, you bought it_. But then she smiled, pulling a large, dark blue box of cigarettes from her pocket. >>And for you, dearie, your Gitanes. These, however – these go on the House.<< And with a flourish, she produced two long, thin, paper-wrapped cigars.

My companion let out a small cry of delight, then rose slightly from his chair, and gave our waitress a quick, impulsive Berliner double-kiss on both her cheeks. ‘Viele Danke, Schatzi’ he intoned as she backed away, giggling and blushing like a schoolgirl, brushing off his attention, even as her unshakable composure seemed totally perturbed. “You are smoking, yes?” he asked me, even as he leaned over the table to pour me a generous glass of his wine.

“Well, naturally.” I gestured feebly towards the extinguished cigarette in the ashtray, rather hoping that he would offer me one of his Gitanes, but instead he extended me one of the cigars.

“Cuban,” he informed me. “They go perfectly with the wine.”

I unwrapped the paper, and found the cigar oddly sticky. Echoing my companion, I watched what he did, allowed him to clip the end, then bent forward so he could light it with his Zippo. Stupidly, I inhaled, unaccustomed to the extra, unfiltered strength of a cigar, and found my head reeling. But of course, I did not want to blow it by appearing so uncool as to cough or retch before my new friend, so I rode it out, exhaling a long plume and pretending I had meant to do it so. He smirked, but if he noticed anything, he said not a word. I picked up my wineglass, inclined it towards him in acknowledgement of thanks, then took a sip. The waitress was a genius. The smoky, slightly oaky tannin of the old wine mingled perfectly with the earthy, burned-leather taste of the cigar, each flavour both igniting a thirst for, and heightening the effect of the other.

Murmuring my approval, I leaned back and studied my companion, his artfully tousled hair, which was not as careless as it had initially seemed, cut carefully to reveal oddly shaped, slightly pointed ears and a graceful, swanlike neck. The odd angle at which he held his cigar, pinched between two long, elegant fingers like a specimen, seemed to exacerbate my slowly growing impression that he wasn’t quite human, but some creature out of a fairy tale, uncomfortable in the form it had taken to walk among men. But I could sense that he was growing impatient at my silence, and realised I was failing in my duty as a guest, to keep my host entertained.

“And how about you?” I inquired. He looked at me blankly, as if he had forgotten the previous conversation. “What brings you to Berlin?”

Again, he laughed, a great braying peel full of animal joy. “Why, I was born here. This city itself made me.”

Well, that went down like a lead balloon, but his laughter charmed me. I found myself wanting to provoke more of it, but I seemed stuck on some standard-English-small-talk track. “And what do you do?”

His perfectly arched brows knitted together, and I realised my mistake – he disliked the question, and seemed already starting to regret his choice of drinking companion. “Oh... this and that?” The volume of conversation in the room had increased, as downstairs, the gypsy violinist had lead her troupe of musicians through into the main ballroom, and the sound reverberated up through the dome, lending it an oddly beguiling echoey, underwater effect.

“This and that?” I repeated, taking another long drag of the cigar and feeling my senses start to reel, swirling about as wild and disordered as the howling gypsy violin.

A slightly sheepish expression that gave way from petulance to false modesty. “Mostly, I sing.”

“Sing?” I echoed, feeling really quite distraught with the heat and the noise, and the heady influence of the cigar. The smoke had a strange, slightly herbal aftertaste I was unaccustomed to, causing me to worry slightly that it might have been laced with something – or perhaps that herbal aftertaste was the odd liqueur I had downed, proving to be much, much stronger than I had reckoned with. The fairy tale unreality of the night seemed to increase, as my head spun, and I wondered if the unearthly creature had stolen my voice, so that I could only echo him – and now he was even mocking me by echoing my occupation?

But the exquisite creature tilted his head back, and listened carefully, to catch the beat of the gypsy song, before his voice took off in flight, like a bird suddenly launching itself into song. The song was in German – of course – and I caught only a fraction of the words, which seemed to indicate that it was some kind of drinking song, but the wildness of the music and the abruptly astonishing beauty of his voice seemed to converge to stop time, as every soul in the room fell silent, listening to the melody spill from his full, wine-stained lips.

He sang for less than a minute, but the world stood still for him, and the silence lasted even a few moments after the song ended, when a smattering of people about the room burst into applause. >>Give us another one, Blixa<< called out a voice from across the balcony, but he shushed them with an elegant wave of the hand, then picked up his wineglass and drained it.

“Gosh, that was jolly good,” I heard my voice say, idiotically. Blixa? What kind of a name was _Blixa_? He merely smiled, tight-lipped, at the compliment, and poured another drink. Think, man, think of something less silly to say, I thought to myself, but I was feeling more than a little awed. “Like something from another era... though I reckon this establishment has heard quite a few drinking songs over the years. I say, though... if you could choose any era of Berlin’s history to relive, _when_ would you go?”

His eyes brightened, as his head snapped back to attention, eyeing me carefully with a slightly faraway expression. He liked the question, and I was glad. “Oh, I loved the 80s Berlin of the Wall the best, that anarchic playground for madmen pretending to be artists and artists pretending to be madmen... but you don’t mean recent history, do you? Before the reconstruction, the ruined Berlin of rubble-mountains and desperate women, I have a desperate yen to see that again, sometimes. But of course, the Kaiserzeit... the pinnacle of Berliner art and culture, the centre of the known world, as my city expanded right across the map, eating up every village in its path... oh, or further back, into deep history, what would one choose? The enlightened reign of Frederick the Great, now he had an eye for a pretty boy, especially a tall one like me. The Hohenzollerns were a bad lot in general, but he knew how to have fun...” This with an unmistakably salacious wink that both confused me and sent my body into a sudden, unexpected spasm of excitement. “Ah, to see the Soldier King and the fortified star-pointed walls of Margraviate Berlin with moats and city gates intact, what a time to be alive, but oh, I never could hold much truck with all those wretched Prussian Values. I think I preferred his father – now he founded the Akademie of Künste, you know, an admirable thing to do, you must admit, which generations of Bohemians must thank him for... Ah, but for an art school in Berlin – you’d want the Bauhaus, wouldn’t you? That’s your era, isn’t it – Weimar, and Dada and all that?”

Sipping at my wine and taking puffs of that potent cigar, I had let the man’s story’s captivate me, swirling me away into Berlin’s colourful past, but I realised his question required an answer. “The interwar period, like the period of The Wall, produced such an ineffable intensity of artful creative madness, because the only response to a world gone mad, is to fully embrace one’s own madness,” I murmured.

Another piercing bray of laughter, as his eyes flashed and he stabbed at the air with the tip of his cigar. “When is the world ever not mad? That’s what I’d like to know. The march of progress is just one long furrow of destruction, ploughed with the wreckage of catastrophes and famines and wars. So when has the world ever _not_ been mad?”

“The Pax Augustus... the Pax Victoriana...” I countered, happy to be back on a topic I knew a bit about.

“Well, look how that ended,” he snorted. “With two of her grandchildren trying to carve up the map of Europe between them to resolve their own childhood rivalries.”

“But it has been peaceful since The Wall fell. Have you ever heard the theory,” I found myself expounding, my tongue loosened by the wine. “Very popular in the Economics Departments of certain universities, that since the USSR has broken up... no two countries have ever gone to war – that both had a branch of MacDonald’s.”

“That’s not true,” my companion protested.

“Name one,” I blustered, and waited a few seconds for a response, but he merely looked blank, as if racking his brains for a counter-example. “It seems that Capitalism, for all its ills, can accomplish what diplomacy never could – it will abolish the motivation for international warfare, because war is bad for business.”

“Bullshit!” exploded the man across the table, in a voice so loud that half the balcony turned to see, causing him to look about apologetically, and lower his hands, palms down, in a placatory gesture, to show that nothing was wrong. “Capitalism is the biggest motivation for wars of all time. The consumption of arms, weapons, military supplies, is the engine that drives the whole bloody capitalist machine.”

“So you are a Communist?” I probed, surprised. I hadn’t met one in ages, as any kind of socialism had become intensely unfashionable once the full extent of the rot of the Soviet Union had been exposed.

“Not even remotely,” snorted my companion. “No one could live in such a divided city, surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns, and think communism to be desirable. But it does not seem to me, that this rampant cowboy boom-town now colonising the East is any better. I am afraid, of what unfettered Capitalism will do to the world, with no system to oppose it. And mark my words, it will not remain unopposed for long – no, Capitalism cannot tolerate a world without conflict. So, the Communists were bad, yes. But if there’s one thing that Berlin has learned over its history, it is this – that the Kaisers were bad, but what came after them – the Weimar Republic – was worse. The Weimar Republic was bad, but what came after – the Nazis – were worse. The Nazis were bad, but what came after – the DDR, the so-called German Democratic Republic – do you see my point?”

“So you think that whatever comes after Communism will be worse?”

“And whatever comes after Capitalism is through with Berlin, that will be even worse still! Look, we should know – the Prussians invented it!” His eyes flashed, but his tone was not angry, it was playful, teasing and light-hearted.

“The Prussians invented what? War, or Capitalism?” I shot back in the same mischievous tone

“Suffering,” he said, with an air of finality. “The Prussians invented Suffering as a Prussian Virtue. More wine?”

I held out my glass, smiling, eagerly, perhaps a little too eagerly, for as his eyes met mine, he seemed to see something inside my very soul, for he leaned forwards, our eyes still locked, and I felt something twist inside me, as he smiled back wolfishly.

The conversation moved on, but I realised, a little too slowly through the fog of wine and those doctored cigars, that our playful bantering tone had become something else. I was no longer arguing to win – and neither, I think, was he. I was arguing the way one argued with a pretty woman, flirting, showing off one’s knowledge a little bit to impress her, yes, but at the same time, trying to pull something out of her, to flatter her intelligence by showing her she was a worthy opponent for your intellect. After all, you want a woman, don’t you, who is just smart enough to truly understand how intelligent you are?

But I could not shake the feeling that I was only brushing the surface of his intellect, as he deftly manoeuvred verbally, constantly outwitting me even in his second language, snapping his fingers in frustration at words or concepts that would not come in English, before supplying an obscure synonym that left me gasping at his mental acuity. I was smitten, as if glancing into an abyss I could only imagine the bottom of, by those brief glimpses of the true breadth of his intelligence. And as we moved on to our second bottle of wine, I was caught, like a fly in resin, between wanting to impress him, wanting him to feel the power and breadth of my wit; and just wanting to swoon a little at his ornate, playful language, wanting to gasp with delight at the clever turns of phrase he employed, wanting only to bask and luxuriate in the depths of his knowledge of obscure facts and interesting titbits. If he were a woman, I would have been fighting and reeling her in, and trying to land her like a fish, but all I could do was stare at his full red lips, and wonder what would come out of them next.

And yet, the whole time, the craving inside me was growing.

You never forget it, really, not wholly, once it has taken hold, though sometimes, when other things capture your attention, it’s quiet, ignorable, a mere annoyance of a whisper. At other times, it’s like a raging need, as urgent as hunger, or lust, or the desperate desire to urinate. But that night, it grew slowly, like an idea hovering forever on the horizon of my consciousness, working its way into conversations with the insistence of a Freudian slip. As an example of British imperialism, my mind got onto the Opium Wars, and would not move on. On a tangent into Psychoanalysis and the work of Herr Sigmund, my attention kept returning doggedly to the subject of his addiction. And on a brief discussion of Greek Mythology, I could not stop from meandering aloud through my confusion over whether it was Bacchantes or Delphic Sibyls who utilised the fumes of the poppy plant to heighten creativity, or ecstasy, or provide relief from the tyranny of conscious thought – or wasn’t that music? Or was that the sweet, blessed relief of sleep, safe within the arms of Morpheus, that most blessed of gods, the one god I could worship with all of my heart and soul?

And at that point, my companion stopped, touched me gently on the arm, a bolt of electrical discharge that made all of the hairs stand up, and looked deep into my eyes as if searching for the answer there, then said, quite low and quite calm, “You need to fix, don’t you?”

Abruptly, I felt completely naked before him, but I hadn’t even the wits to lie, still feeling that electric sensation where his skin touched mine, coursing through me, as stimulating as any drug. “Honestly, I need to _score_.”

At that moment, I felt as though he saw it all: my weakness; my helpless flight from Kotti; my fear of those beggars, those junkies who had also seen straight through my armour of trendy clothes and rock-star haircut, into that desperate hunger of need. They had had my number alright: Junkie. And that was why they had terrified me so. They were my future, and I their past.  But this beautiful man, with his ravaged cheekbones and his penetrating eyes, he looked deep into my addict soul, but he did not flinch, and neither did he pull away. Finally, he sighed, a long, worldweary exhalation of all the horror and history and sadness of Berlin, and slowly nodded.

“Alright, but not here.”

“You have some?” I almost gasped.

“I know where I can get some.”

I almost clawed my way up from the table, so desperate was I to get on with the business, now the possibility of scoring was finally dangled in front of me. But my companion was steady, and calm, and insisted that everything must be done in its right time. His smile was triumphant; he must have known he already had me where he wanted me. That I would have done anything he asked, for what he could get me. But he waited, biding his time. We finished our drinks. He settled up with the waitress, for two bottles of their finest wine, a pack of Gitanes and my ‘house specialty’, an almost obscene amount of Deutschmarks passing between them. He took a small jar of some kind of ointment from inside one of his pockets, and anointed his lips with the waxy contents, as if in preparation for the chapping cold outside, the faint whiff of cherries as his mouth glistened, red as some forbidden fruit. And then, slowly, he raised himself to his feet, and pulled his long coat about his angular shoulders, then gestured for me to follow him.


	3. The Fix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The narrator goes with Blixa to find a fix, and realises he will be paying for the deal with more than just a kiss.

It took forever to get out of the club. He knew everyone, and everyone had to have their farewell, a smile, an incline of the head, a wave of the hand, even that Berliner embrace with the double kiss. People glanced at me, their faces admiring or pitying in turn – surely they must have _known_ what our business was about – but only one person stopped to speak to me. The gypsy violinist, her playing paused for a moment to take a drink, turned and saw who I was leaving with, and her face turned completely horror-struck.

‘No,’ she cried, and caught at the sleeve of my coat. ‘Don’t do it. You do not want, what he is selling. Just trust me on this one thing. You do not want it.’

>>Leave me in peace, old woman,<< I almost spat, my need turning me cruel, as the wine had loosened my German, while I dug in my pocket for a coin to throw in her open violin case. >>You have no idea what I need.<<

But she turned back to me, her face shining, as I realised I was mistaken – she was not an old woman, but a dazzlingly beautiful creature, with a face the colour of ivory, glowing with a faint golden glow under the candlelight. ‘Blixa,’ she said, and it was at that point, that I realised I could understand her perfectly, though she, too, was _not speaking English_. ‘Leave this one be? He is too young. Look at him, he’s an innocent.’

Blixa’s eyes flashed, and there was the sudden smell of singed hair, like someone’s feather boa had been caught by a candle, as he stepped closer to her. ‘He’s made his choice. The boy wants what he wants.’

Across the room, a door opened, blowing a gust of cold air across the room as some new guest arrived. Everyone turned to look, but it was an older man in an elaborate hat, who bowed his greetings to the assembled guests before taking a seat with one of the established groups near the door. When I turned back to the gypsy violinist blocking my way, she was merely an old woman again, the golden glow gone as she muttered to herself in some foreign language – Czech, at a guess – and picked up the scattered coins in her violin case for safe-keeping. Blixa took me firmly by the elbow, and guided me safely through the crowd to a back door, where we stepped out into the night.

As the door closed behind us, cutting off the light, I realised that the snow had stopped, but there was no moon and the night was completely dark. We were out in the cold, in some internal Hof, deep in the building, surrounded on all sides by high walls that showed creamy-gold and dark green tiles wherever pale lamplight spilled impotently from windows above. Still holding me by the elbow, Blixa half-lead, half-pushed me across the courtyard to a dark tunnel, presumably leading either to another Hof, or the street. >>Treppenhaus F<< declared an ornate blackletter sign as we passed. But on the other side was not the street, but another Hof, even older and darker and grimier. Another sign pointed towards >>Treppenhäuser G, H & I.<<

“How many Hofs does this house have?” I wondered aloud.

“This way,” insisted Blixa jauntily, as we ducked through another dark corridor. Another Hof, even more decrepit and filthy than the previous two, but my need overcame my fear.

“Where are we going?” I muttered as we crossed through a well of starlight into shadow that seemed deeper than velvet.

At that moment, Blixa turned to me, his facing shining in the gloom, as I realised that the ethereal pallor of his ivory skin actually seemed to glow slightly in the dark, as if with the internal light of some strange deep-sea creature. He was, I saw now, an inch or two taller than me, and I was not a short man, but from that angle, he looked more beautiful than I had ever seen a man look, his light brown hair standing about his head in a great dark halo, his sharp Greta Garbo cheekbones, his full lips wine-dark and glistening as if still wet with that vintage wine. “Do you want this?” he asked, with a voice as intoxicating as sin.

“You know that I need it,” I almost whined.

“But do you _want_ it?”

“Yes,” I hissed.

And he reached out a great black arm, enfolded in a feathery mass of dark wool, his coat as long and flowing as a cloak, and pulled me close against his chest as he brought his mouth down on mine, and kissed me.

For a moment, I panicked. He was so warm in the cold night that his mouth felt like fire against my own. My first thought was vulgar – oh god, is this what I’ve come to, is this what Berlin has reduced me to? Whoring myself for a man, to slake my need for junk. But as his tongue expertly parted my lips, and his hand reached the back of my neck, I found myself surprised by my sudden hunger, sucking the great hot mass of his tongue into my mouth as I pressed up against him, body against body, warm even through our clothes. Yes, I wanted it – I wanted _him_ , with a sudden sharp pang of desire that seemed to sweep through me like a fever, wanted him more than I had ever wanted any woman – and I found myself actively desiring to sink to my knees and give my body to him completely, rejoicing in the degradation that Berlin had wreaked in me. My own hands went to his neck, tangled themselves in his hair, pulling his shoulders closer to me, wanting him to wrap the warmth of his dark, wing-like coat about me and enfold me in that pale and silent deep-sea glow.

Finally, he pulled back and smiled cruelly, showing his crooked teeth, leaving me gasping, almost breathless at my own need, the desire, the lust for him acting in concert with my craving for junk, just as the slightly ambergris tobacco-herbal aftertaste of the Cuban cigar had highlighted my thirst for that oaky vintage wine. I wanted him so much that I could hardly breathe for wanting.

“You kiss like you know what you’re doing,” he observed, wiping my spit from his mouth with the back of his hand, and I felt almost ashamed at the copious saliva of my hunger. It was posed as an observation, but it was clear it was a question, even a challenge.

“Please...” I said. “The drugs?”

“Of course. Don’t be so impatient.” He raised one eyebrow, with a faint smirk as if enjoying the act of withholding what he knew I needed. “I must go upstairs. Do _not_ follow me. Just wait here until I return.”

“OK,” I agreed, knowing I would wait until the cock’s crow – or the end of time. He moved to the door – marked Treppenhaus X, in fading blackletter type – glanced back at me one last time, half in hunger, half in warning, then raised the latch and slipped inside.

Waiting. An eternity of waiting. Roland Barthes’ words played on repeat in my head – it is the lover who waits. A light appeared in one of the windows above, two figures silhouetted against the glass. They embraced, that Berliner double-kiss of hello, and my heart ached with jealousy. I caught the sound of voices, that same silvery tongue that meant they were not speaking English, but they were too far away to make out the words. The other one became angry – his (her?) voice raised, taught with emotion – but Blixa’s voice remained calm, low, deep and oddly soothing, until the fight passed. A flurry of black feathers fell from above – no, it was only a bird roosting somewhere in the gables – then a strange glow of silver from the window. I waited, on tenterhooks, aching in body and heart. Then finally, after an impossible eternity, the quick beat of footsteps down the stairs, and the door sprang open, and my companion emerged, his face dark with some unreadable emotion that turned quickly to a wolfish smile as he saw me waiting.

“Did you get it?” I demanded, my voice as petulant as a betrayed lover.

He nodded, but remained firm. “Not here.”

“Where?” I demanded. He reached inside his coat, and my heart leapt, but when he withdrew it, I was disappointed. No bundle, no tiny folded envelope, no little plastic baggie, just his empty hand. But as he raised his fingers to my face, and gently touched my mouth, I realised he had a few grains dusted on the tip of his finger. I touched my tongue to it, just to make sure, the sharp acrid bitterness of it a relief, then sucked his finger hungrily, desperately into my mouth, wanting to imbibe every morsel, praying for the hit to take hold – or at least allay some of that desperate need. But the taste was not enough. Of course it wasn’t.

“Come,” he said, and threaded his arm through mine.

I’ve no idea where we went. That brief morsel was still somehow enough to deaden the senses and block out the outside world. It’s strange how people represent heroin as the ultimate high – it isn’t, not at all, after the rush of the first few doses. It is the opposite of a high, a kind of numbing, a deadening, a reduction of fear, of pain, it simply dials down the impossible overbearing sense-impressions of the world and makes the intolerable pain of life bearable, for a brief spell.

And that is how I knew that what he had given me was _not heroin_ – though it certainly slaked the same craving. Because I felt high, dizzyingly, head-spinningly high, from just that taste. I felt as though we were flying down the dark streets of Kreuzberg, our feet not even touching the dirty, dogshit ground. He lead me on, his arm threaded through mine like a vice, like I was under arrest, a prisoner of need and lust. My mind was all in phantasies, the whirling Gründerzeit architecture uncoiling and writhing all around me, leading us on. Did we cross the canal, or did we just walk alongside it for a while? I don’t know – all I saw was silvery light glinting off the water, the whir of wings, swans and mallards and great gusts of feathers – or was it snow?

We turned down a side-street. I wish to god, now, that I had remembered to check the name, but at the time I saw only his face, his sharply pointed nose like the prow of a ship guiding us into the night. But finally we stopped at a grand old apartment house that was so old, it was almost black with the encrusted dirt of decades of neglect. Clearly, it had once been magnificently elegant, with cornucopias and blackened cherubs still clinging to the plastered brick. As he dug through his pockets for his keys, I tilted my head back, admiring the graceful architecture of another era. Two huge banks of cantilevered oriel windows flanked rows of graceful balconies, each window surmounted with a sculpted head, every balcony borne aloft by a strapping young Atlas. But unusually for Berlin, the heads and bodies were all male, beautiful youths whose swirling locks merged with their angel wings to crown each pediment. And at the very top, supporting a pair of massive dormer windows that stood proud of the roof, were a row of caryatids, though again, unusually, these caryatids were not scantily clad goddesses, but young men – wait, no, not men but angels – their slender chests and arching wings straining to hold up the skylights. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, but the caryatids’ faces, their high cheekbones, their pointed noses and their long, sculpted jaws, they looked oddly familiar.

“Well, that’s funny.” I observed as Blixa finally located his keys. “The caryatids - those sculptures on top of the building – they look a bit like you.”

“So I’ve been told.” He smiled wryly, and stepped back from the door, craning his neck to gaze up at these plaster angels gracing the roof. “Perhaps they were distant relations?”

I moved closer to him, and dared to reach out, to touch his face, running my fingers down the sculpted-looking contours of his cheekbones.

“Not here,” he whispered, and took my hand in his as he pushed it down. “Inside.”

He scrabbled with his keys in the lock, then he pushed open the huge, ornate ironwork door, and we were off the street again, walking slowly down a long, echoing hall towards the Hof, our hands still grasped together as we passed a row of impossibly tall, gaunt, angular angels, frozen in time, painted on the frieze that stretched up into the gloom.

We climbed. I have no idea how many stairs we climbed. He seemed to half pull me up behind him, and I swear his feet didn’t touch the ground as we climbed past window after window, the view of the Hof outside constantly changing as we rose, from the filthy ground, to the rain-pitted heights. And finally, at the top, just under the eaves of the roof, he stopped, dropped my hand, and fiddled inside his coat for the key.

The carved wooden door creaked open onto a huge, cavernous, empty space, up under sloping ceilings. The only furniture I could see was a large, unmade mattress, but I didn’t even look at the bed, for all I saw was those windows. Those huge dormer windows I had admired from the street formed a wall of glass that looked out over the roofs of Berlin, facing north towards the Fernsehturm on the other side of The Wall, its glowing tip just visible over the neighbour’s attics. And on each side of the windows, those enormous caryatids, each about twice the size of a normal human being, but looking even more spookily like my companion from close-up, with their gaunt cheekbones, their staring eyes, and their crests of sculpted hair that swept back to meet their arched wings.

“Do you _live_ here?” I asked, stupidly, absolutely absorbed by that breathtaking view.

“I don’t live anywhere... but I roost here sometimes... with my plaster brothers.” From the tone of his voice, clearly the resemblance of the winged caryatids amused him.

“If I lived here, I’d never leave this window,” I mused dreamily as I stared out into the night.

“Sometimes it is tempting.” I heard some shuffling behind me, then a faint cough, as he tried to make the awkward question sound natural. “Do you have... your own works? I’m afraid I haven’t got anything you can use to shoot up.”

I turned, and there he stood, holding the expected tiny folded-paper envelope in his outstretched hand. For a whole minute, I had actually forgotten what we had come here for. For a moment, I wanted to back out, I wanted to tell him... oh no, forget about that. I can’t be arsed with all that now – look, let’s just climb out on the roof and lie there in the starlight, trying to see as angels see. But a moment later, that juddering need hit me, like a blow to the stomach, as I found myself drawn towards the grainy powder like a magnet.

“Oh no, I never shoot up. All that business with the veins... I find it faintly grotesque. I usually just snort it, if you have somewhere I can cut...”

He shrugged effortlessly, then disappeared into another room. For a moment, I wanted to cry out, to scream for him to come back, but he reappeared a minute later, carrying a tiny, slightly tarnished spoon, with a depressed hollow in one gracefully tapered end, that seemed to have been designed, in some 1920s fashion, for exactly the purpose to which we were about to put it. He gestured towards the bed, and I sat, as there was nowhere else to sit, and then politely, thinking of sparing the tangled bedsheets, removed my shoes. As he remained standing, he dug the spoon into the small envelope, tapped off the excess powder, then demonstrated the thing’s use, inserting it into one nostril while he closed the other with a finger, then inhaling the entire dose in one go.

For a moment, his whole face changed, lit up, his lips twitching and quivering, as I found my whole body tensing in anticipation of what I knew would come next. But he shook himself like a wet dog, then smiled, and loaded up the tiny spoon for me. I took it from him, but was disappointed to see the paper envelope secreted away, back into his voluminous pockets. For a moment, I just stared at the tiny silver spoon – Blicksdicht Ballhaus, it declared in graceful Art Deco letters down the length of the handle – then I raised it to my own nostril, and gratefully inhaled, waiting, all shivery, for the drug to work its magic.

For a moment, I felt absolutely nothing but the numbing sting of medicine on my nasal cavities, and I wondered if he had made some mistake. And then, abruptly, my head exploded. It was as if I had tilted my head back, and those dark angels outside had simply poured the contents of the entire night sky into my brain all at once. I felt beyond high... I felt in love, sexual climax, religious ecstasy, and the intense pleasure of a rush of new knowledge, all at once. I felt like a new man, born again, full of energy, my whole skin tingling and burning and crying out to be touched, and I knew, with absolute certainty, that _this was not heroin_ , just like the language they had been speaking _was not English_.

I was too far gone to care. Whatever it was, it was better than any drug I had ever tried, and as my head lolled back almost insensate, I saw that that beautiful man had sat down on the bed beside me, and had taken my chin in his hand and was pulling my face towards his. He pushed his long hair out of his face, an elegant gesture, but as he inclined his head towards mine, it cascaded in a brown wave, down across his forehead towards his cheekbones, just brushing my skin with its velvety softness, and I suddenly felt like a man could actually die of beauty. He was the most absurdly beautiful creature I had ever seen, his eyes a shade of blue even beyond the rainbow, the arch of his cheekbones more graceful than a gothic cathedral, his lips a bouquet of ripe fruit just waiting to be tasted...

We kissed. It was more than a kiss; it was as if our two bodies had become joined at the mouth, and flowed together, blood and nerves and pleasure surging into one another. To touch him was an agony, his silken skin peach-smooth; to be touched by him the most exquisite ecstasy, as every nerve, every synapse seemed to fire to life beneath his fingertips. I kissed, I bit, I combed my fingers into that long brown hair, I reached for the bow at his neck, and pulled it loose, untying it to get at the pale white expanse of his bony chest. We fell back onto the bed together, panting, hearts throbbing with the drug and our lust, limbs tangled together, fingers and arms and legs entwined until I could no longer tell what was his skin, and what was mine. I did not remember removing my clothes, but our skins were suddenly naked together, and it felt as if it had been agony to have even silk between us, so perfect was the feel of his body against mine. I wanted to press myself against him – not just against him, but into him, between the pores of his skin, to physically merge my body with his. I grabbed at the waistband of his leather trousers, and pulled them off him, slipping from his slender body like a snake shedding its skin. To kiss, to caress, to grab hold of great handfuls of flesh, it was the most perfect thing, and every touch seemed to push the effects of the drug deeper and deeper into my body.

We rolled together on those dirty sheets – first him on top, and then me getting the upper hand, gazing down at his beauty in awe, before he wrestled me back and pinned me to the mattress to tease me by raking his teeth gently across my neck. My hand reached lower, and found his groin, then stopped, both terrified and fascinated as my hand closed around his cock, but I could go no further, frozen with wanting and yet with not knowing what to do.

He glanced down at me, noted the cock that had risen towards him, and smiled. “You haven’t been with a man before, have you?” he asked softly, his voice a caress and not a recrimination.

“No,” I whimpered, wishing to god my naiveté didn’t show.

“Do you want...” he said, lying down beside me, his arm thrown across my stomach to caress my balls, his lips pressed up against my ear so that his breath raised little rivulets of ecstasy down my aural canal. “To take, or to be taken? Do you wish, to be the lover, or the loved? Would you rather... be the giver, or the given to?”


	4. Angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sex and loss - is saving someone's life always a kindness? (With apologies to Walter Benjamin, who I quote freely within.)

With a sudden rush of breath, I bit my lip in terror and anticipation, afraid to articulate what I really wanted, but knew I craved as strongly as I had wanted that drug only moments ago. “Can I be greedy... and be the one who is given to?”

He smiled, and a fierce fire shone in his eyes that almost made me doubt my choice. “You can be as greedy as you like. The pleasure... is in the giving.” And with that, he bent forward and kissed me, just at the base of my forehead. “Turn around.”

I only realised, as he said it, what he intended. And yet, as I realised it, I knew I wanted it with a longing stronger than reason, wanted to be peeled back and cracked open, impaled and hammered and split apart, wanted to be _penetrated_ , like a woman, wanted to be totally and wholly claimed by this beautiful creature whose lips had set me aflame.

He reached behind him, and dug in his coat as if to get more of the drug. But no, it was that tiny pot of scented petroleum jelly he had applied to his lips to keep them from chapping. Digging some out, he melted it with his hands, releasing the scent of fresh cherries, then rubbed it firmly all over the tip of his hardened cock, just as he pressed it between my legs.

“Do you want more?”

“Oh yes,” I gasped, not even knowing what I was agreeing to but knowing I wanted anything he was giving. And suddenly, his left hand had the tiny silver spoon, and was pushing it up against my nose. His timing was exquisite. I inhaled, and the drug hit, harder the second time, just as his shaft burst up inside me and slid home, every nerve singing with ecstasy and pain and pleasure and being fucked from inside and his hand on my cock were all the same thing. I could no longer tell what was inside and what was out, just that every molecule of my body was vibrating with sensation.

It hurt. It didn’t matter. I was on fire, and couldn’t feel it because that drug both numbed and excited, turning pain into pleasure and pleasure into a soaring ecstatic high that found no bounds. It felt amazing, my entire body opened up, his shining light probing all of my darkest places and leaving them singing with joy. To be fucked. To be laid open and fucked like a girl. I never wanted it to stop. He pulled me up, so that we were both kneeling on the mattress, and tugged me around to face the window. That wall of glass, the two black angels with their sweeping art nouveau wings, all of Berlin was watching me getting fucked like a girl, and I didn’t care. I welcomed it. I wanted them to see what he was doing to my body, his hand on my cock, stroking, stroking, stroking. I had never felt my cock so hard, or so erect, the sensations deadened by years of drug abuse roaring to life again, as I felt myself growing, expanding, thickening, inch by inch until my magnificent engorged cock felt large enough to take on all of Berlin, because I was fucking the sky in, above and around Berlin as if I were fucking the city itself.

Then he angled his sharp hips, and started to push my body harder. Oh god, yes. He heaved me up by the scruff of my neck, until we were both standing, and pushed me against the glass. For a moment, I caught our reflection as if in a mirror, my body pale and skewered, his frame silhouetted dark behind me, and I swear, he had wings, he had great feathered arcs of wings streaming out behind him as he slammed me into that window, and fucked me, grasping my face with his hands, and forcibly turning it to observe Berlin. The glass was old, surely it would crack if he manhandled me with such force, and...

...suddenly the street was no longer there. We were up in the air, and he was holding me, cradling me in his wings, still skewered on his cock as he showed me a muddy swamp far below, cloven by two rivers into an island. Berlin and Cölln, two tiny settlements on either side of the banks. I gasped, and wriggled in his grasp, and then I blinked, and I could see the dirty glass again, could see the two plaster angels and the roofs and the television tower beyond. But he held me tight, and put his hand on my throat, pushing my face back, forcing me to watch.

‘ _See Berlin_ ,’ he whispered in that strange silvery tongue I understood without knowing how. ‘ _Peel back the layers, see, as through a glass, darkly, all of her bloody and great history._ ’ And the glass was gone again, and the island was fortified, ringed all round with great pointed fortifications and a moat. I shook my head, and the Berlin of the present shimmered back into view. But he pushed at me with his cock, a great heaving thrust that pushed me bodily back into the past. I saw the Wall, I saw the city divided, as it had been ten years previously, riots in the streets of Kreuzberg and police cars on fire. ‘ _See_ ,’ he commanded, and I saw. The Wall disappeared, and the buildings crumbled, I could see through holes in the walls of the tenements, all the way to the still-smoking ruins of Mitte, the buildings all jagged shards of wrecked brick and crumbled plaster. ‘ _See_ ,’ he said. ‘ _See my city. See her as I see her, all the layers, all the stories, all the history peeled back._ ’ He thrust into me again, my entire body singing out in pleasure as the buildings joined themselves back together, streets made whole again, a shining silver Berlin of the future, with huge towers and glass temples grown up tall in the wastelands of Potsdamer Platz and just north of the Reichstag, like no Berlin I had ever seen, or would see for another twenty years. ‘ _See her_ ,’ he whispered, and the glass towers melted away, replaced by turrets and gables and fanciful confections of plaster and glass under shimmering gaslight, the streets bustling with trams and horse-drawn carriages, the Kaiserzeit in all its glory. ‘ _See me_.’

“Who are you?” I gasped, even as I felt my body shuddering, coming very close to climax, unable to catch my breath, my brain and body reeling as if from dizziness and a disorientation very much like jet lag, or motion-sickness, or maybe even _time-sickness_.

He raised his head, and pulled me back from the glass, so that I could see our reflection. Behind me, I saw the dark, arched wings of an angel, looking as though he were about to move away from something he was fixedly contemplating. His eyes were staring, his mouth, open, his wings completely spread, his beautiful, shining face turned toward the past.

Slowly, carefully, in a voice both incredibly deep and world-weary, and yet as crystal clear and beautiful as a silver stream, the Angel Blixa opened his deep red lips and spoke, in that language that was neither German nor English, nor any human tongue.  ‘ _Where you perceive a chain of events, I see one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage and hurling it in front of my feet. I would very much like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in my wings with such a violence that I can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels me into the future to which my back is turned, while the pile of debris before me grows skyward. This storm is what you mortals call progress._ ’

His dark wings folded about me, and as the feathers brushed the flesh of my shoulders, I came, my entire body ratcheting in ecstasy as not just my cock, but my entire nervous system, from my toes to the roots of my hair, seemed to expel itself all at once, into the night sky.

I swooned. I must have lost consciousness, for when I came to, we were only two tired, naked young men, lying strung out on a dirty sheet beneath grime-encrusted windows.

He was still inside me, still moving softly, sending little shimmers of aftershock pleasure through my now-limp cock, his arms still wrapped around my chest, and something else, something warm and feathery, perhaps his coat, perhaps his wings, wrapped softly around me to keep me from the cold. I felt like I could stay like that forever, the warmth of the drug, the bonhomie of post-orgasm, his breath soft on the back of my neck, and his cock inside me, as I gazed out across the glistening roofs of Berlin, for outside, it had started to snow again. And for the first time in my young life, I suddenly realised, as I pushed myself back against his hips, that it bothered me that my partner had not yet come.

With women, I had always been a selfish lover. Sure, I had some vague idea that girls experienced desire – I’d never thought what for – but I always assumed that their desire was to be penetrated, taken, but most of all, a desire to please their man. If they got pleasure out of sex, beyond moaning and groaning and putting on a good show, that was not really any of my concern. I had never asked, up until that point, if my partner had climaxed, so long as I had had my own. But that cock, still stiff and erect deep inside me, it seemed a sudden recrimination against my selfishness as a lover.

Grinding myself harder against his exquisite flesh, I enquired, solicitous, half desperate, “Are _you_ going to come?”

He stirred to life, as if from a deep, dreamy sleep. ‘Do you really want that?’

“I want you to feel the pleasure that I have felt,” I replied, urgently, filled with a new need I still could not entirely understand.

‘Do you know what you ask?’

“I don’t care,” I insisted stubbornly, doggedly, reaching back behind me and grabbing the great long muscles of his thighs, pulling him deeper inside me. It was my heart that was on fire this time, rather than my loins, a need that seemed as great as my need for heroin had seemed, only a few minutes – hours? – ago. I wanted him to feel joy, wanted him to know the peace of orgasm, and remembering that look of horror and melancholy and loneliness that had passed across his face as he had unfurled his great wings, I wanted to make him whole again. “You have been so kind to me. You... who owe me nothing. I have had pleasure from you, like I have had from no one else... I wish I could take away the burden of your sadness, if only for the moment of orgasm, so that you could feel peace.”

‘Do you understand what it is, that I give?’ he asked, his voice dark and terrifying.

“I don’t care. I only want you to be happy.” I had no idea what these strange new emotions were, but I knew that I was completely overpowered by them. If there were anything that it were possible, in my power, to give the Angel to make him content – I knew I would do it without question.

The Angel redoubled his thrusts, quickening his speed. I could feel him slamming into me with every heartbeat, reaching deeper and deeper until I thought I would split open, but I didn’t care. I wanted it all, wanted everything he could give me. I looked out across the darkened roofs of Berlin, and felt my heart thudding with newfound care and compassion, and oh god... with _love_.

“I love Berlin,” I found myself muttering as he moved inside me, with a passion that surprised me. “This dirty, dark, great, old, beautiful, dangerous, gem of a whore. I love her. At last, I understand, and am understood... I feel _myself_ here, able to be who I truly am, in a way I feel nowhere else in the world. She gives so much with one hand, then takes away at a moment’s notice with the other hand. She offers so much, then withholds and withdraws without the slightest thought, and yet through her, one gains – not the world – but one’s own deepest true self. So that for all her trouble and darkness, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. I know she does not care one whit for me, but still... I _love_. I love who I am here; I am a fucking queer.”

Behind me, the Angel’s body tensed, and started to shudder, like I knew he must be very close to orgasm, and I opened myself as wide as I could, prepared to accept whatever it was that he chose to give me. For a moment, he pushed deep inside me, and I felt pleasure surging through me with an almost electric thrill, as if I were about to come again, as if the drug were coming back up into my bloodstream, and for a moment, I felt I were standing on the edge of a very great precipice , and completely prepared to just let go and fall.

‘Aaaahhh... I can’t!’ Abruptly, he pulled out of me.

I was about to protest, to demand to know whatever it was that I needed to do to make him come, because I was prepared to do any of it – do all of it. But at that moment, I felt a tiny drop of stinging liquid touch my skin as he withdrew, and realised that he was already coming.

‘I can’t do it. I can’t do this to you,’ he roared as he rolled backwards, away from me, and I saw his ejaculate spin away from me, up into the air, glimmering and shimmering like crystal, hard and cold and the deepest _red_ , an unnatural, unhealthy, murderous red, the colour of decadence, the colour of despair, the colour of blood. My skin stung, as if I had been burned with acid, from that one tiny drop that had touched me, yet it was a pain that was more beautiful than life itself. And I understood, in that fatal moment, as the droplets seemed to hiss and fizz and boil away into the night before they even hit the sheets, that if he had come inside me, _I would be dead_! Yet, still I yearned for him, still wanted it, everything that he could give me. Because that one bright red drop, even as it burned my skin and turned me nearly inside out, took me higher than any drug, any love, any emotion I had ever felt, or would feel ever again.

And as I passed out from the agony of that burning, I saw the angel, his face wet with tears, though from sadness or joy or just the relief of orgasm, I can never tell.

 

 

I woke in a hospital, with no memory of how I’d got there.

No, not no memories, but only broken, shattered, disjointed memories that made no sense.

I remember lying on that dirty mattress, almost dead, staring fixedly at the Angel as he crouched, smoking, in the window, his face grave with concern, muttering darkly as if fighting with himself.

I remember staring out into an unholy glow I thought was the dawn, but was only a tiny, concentrated sliver of light, shining silver in the east somewhere above the television tower, growing ever nearer and nearer as I slipped further and further from consciousness.

I remember the sensation of flying, of being borne aloft by great black wings, the backstreets and tenements of Berlin like dolls’ houses below.

I remember being placed, with great care, outside the door of an emergency room, not falling, not stumbling or passing out, but being _placed_ , as if by a gentle hand from above.

I remember crying out, “Don’t leave me, I love you.” And I remember his haunted, painful expression, his face racked with the impossibility of what I wanted, as he replied, in that quicksilver tongue, ‘Then please understand, my leaving you is my gift to you, _because_ you love.’

 

 

I woke in a hospital, with no memory of how I’d got there, hearing the disdainful muttering of the nurses as they changed shifts. A grumble about needing to get the details of my health insurance for payment, a rude comment about Schwules – _queers_ – and they both laughed.

Grappling around me, I felt the catch of the needle for the drip in my arm, and knew I had to get out of there. I had no health insurance – I could not pay. My trendy London clothes were gone, but draped over the arms of a chair, as if from a visitor that had forgotten it, was a long, thick black woollen coat. With gritted teeth, I pulled the drip out of my vein, damped down the bleeding the best I could, then slipped the coat about my shoulders, and fled. In the pockets of the coat were three items – a 20 DM note that would pay for a taxi back to my hotel. A half-full packet of Gitanes, and I knew I would never ever smoke another brand. And a tiny silver spoon, engraved with the words ‘Blicksdicht Ballhaus’.

I never used the spoon, for I quit drugs soon after. I wish I could say the events of that night left me a changed man, but not in the way one might expect. At first, I tried my best to forget, to blot out the pain of loss (the loss both of my angel lover, and the self I thought I had been, before Berlin showed me that I was someone else entirely) by snorting more heroin – but somehow that no longer seemed to work. I escalated, even trying to fix with a needle, and found the drug was like dust in my veins. Nothing worked, after the taste of that strange angelic drug, and I knew as I tried and failed to attain a high from one thing after another, that nothing else ever would work.

I never found the Ballhaus again, though I wandered through Kreuzkölln by night and day, searching every street for a sign of the place. When my band’s tour was over, I moved back to that Kiez, and found a garret apartment, high up in an attic, with a view north through dormer windows, towards the television tower. Drawn by some longing, some need deeper than addiction, I wandered the streets alone, looking for something the way I’d once looked for sex, or drugs, or something worse. How could I tell people I was looking for an angel I had once loved, who had shown me the man I truly was?

Haunting the streets like a pale suicided wretch, I combed up and down one side street after another, gazing up into the ornamentation of each building, searching for masculine angels with slender chests and arched cheekbones, peering into windows of bars and cafes, craning my neck for a glimpse of velvet wallpaper or gilded cherubs. But the Ballhaus had vanished as if it had never been. I never went in anywhere any more, for alcohol gave me no pleasure and brought no release. Homobars fulfilled the needs of the flesh, at least for a short while, but still left me feeling ill at ease, a reminder only of what I had lost, feeling like a ghost in my own life.  How could he have left me in limbo like this, thinking it a kindness to save my life, yet trapping me in this eternal torment of loving only history, while being left forever outside the present, nose pressed against the glass, never able to see him again?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be a spoiler, for those who want to leave the story ambiguous. I think on many levels, the tale works better without any kind of explanation, so imaginative readers can supply their own explanation.
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> Just bear in mind, this is only one explanation, and even though I'm the writer, I don't think I know the real explanation any better than anyone else.
> 
> Close the browser now if you want to keep the mystery.
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> I turned in the end, to history, spending days digging through local libraries and second hand bookshops, searching for answers. Seeking out the oldest residents of the neighbourhood, I sifted through their stories and reminiscences for clues, referred from friend to friend until I gained a reputation that preceded me, as a collector of forgotten and forbidden stories from before the war. Berlin’s secrets consumed me, as I researched hidden queer dive bars and ballrooms from between the wars, searching through History for my Angel of History.
> 
> But the destination of my fateful night eluded me. Walking the streets with historical photos in hand, I was fairly certain I finally found the plaster suicides, those pale wenches I had mistakenly addressed, hanging above the doors of a formerly grand apartment building, though now so thickly layered with paint as to be almost unrecognisable. But when I tried to retrace my steps by turning right then quickly right again, I found no ballhaus, no nightclub, only the hollowed-out cavity of a bombsite where I thought it should have been.
> 
> There never was a Blicksdicht Ballhaus, not in any official history. That was just what the locals called it – the Blackout Ballroom – as you weren’t supposed to know about it. The place had once been a very elegant gay nightclub, in an old building dating back to the Kaiserzeit, that had been shut down as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. It sat empty for a decade, but in the last days of the war, it had been taken up again, by local people who were sick of air raids and shortages and privations. They, who had stood complacently by while the homos were carted off with the Jews and the Communists, to god knows what fate, now just wanted to drink and dance, never mind the bombs, the war, the Nazi prohibitions. They served a disgusting kind of home brewed liquor, made palatable only by adding herbal concoctions made from the kind of wildflowers that grew rampant in the bombsites. And you couldn’t get tobacco, so they smoked cigars made of hemp and rolled in oil of hashish to give a kick.  
> Of course, the party could not last. On a dark, snowy December night in 1943, the night of the 21st, the longest night of the year, the Ballhaus took a direct hit from an Allied firebomb. 200 people died in an instant, burned like candles in their very best clothes, packed in like sardines to hear a swing band play forbidden music. Witnesses said the ruin burned for a week, night and day, the thick smoke, black and pungent, hanging over the crater like the ghastly wings of an exterminating angel.


End file.
